Coffee Barbecue Sauce Recipe

A caffeinated twist on a barbecue favorite

Almost a decade ago, chef Jonathan Adams and his childhood friend Damien Pileggi came up with the perfect Super Bowl barbecue sauce: a caffeine-infused concoction that would keep their friends properly jazzed throughout half-time. The pair has been using various incarnations of the recipe ever since.

Now that Adams is the chef at Philly's Pub & Kitchen and The Diving Horse in Avalon, N.J., and the two of them run Philadelphia's first mobile coffee bar, Rival Bros Coffee, they've tweaked the recipe to include their own craft-roasted coffee. "When cooking with coffee, the point isn't to have the dish taste like coffee," says Adams. "You use it more like a workhorse ingredient. Just to give food that extra dimension."